For me the most
immediate and exciting things about “Kammer/Kammer” were, first, the performances
by Dana Caspersen and Anthony Rizzi, and second, the sheer craftsmanship
with which this otherwise highly fragmented multimedia production was
put together. On the one hand the dancing, acting, filming, and broadcast
of live edited video seemed to relate to one another in an open ended,
almost indeterminate way; but at the same time everything was evidently
planned tightly and executed with extraordinary precision.

Two stories were told in monologues. Caspersen recited the Canadian poet
Anne Carson's lyrical but edgy fantasy about becoming Catherine Deneuve
in a film about a lesbian classics professor obsessed with The Girl, a
role danced by Jone San Martin. Rizzi recited extracts from Douglas Martin's
bluntly unsentimental and terse autobiographical account of his affair
with a gay rock star. Common to both stories were not only same sex relations
but also the alien anonymity of hotel rooms. Almost all the while there
was dancing going on, usually three or four dancers weaving and crashing
together, around, and on one of two big mattresses, each half hidden and
surrounded by flats painted to look like bedroom walls, or single figures
dancing on their own slightly to one side of Deneuve or Rizzi.

San Martin was the
only figure who both danced and had a significant speaking part. I heard
some people complaining afterwards that there wasn't enough dancing; I
think they were mistaken. It was just that the dancing almost never became
the primary focus of attention. For all the dancers' energy and inventiveness,
the audience were continually distracted from it by either the seductive
power of the video or the equally seductive narratives of unfulfilled
gay and lesbian desire.

Initially the filming took place in the parts of the stage that were visible
from the auditorium. Increasingly, however, it happened in other spaces
that were largely hidden. Around the stage, painted flats were arranged
to create these spaces so that it resembled a film studio. (Interestingly,
the first performance in Frankfurt was at the Bockenheimer Depot, which
is not in a conventional proscenium theatre.) At times, particularly when
a robot camera suspended above the stage was used, the effect of this
was spatially very disorienting.

Cunningham has written
about his realization that there are no fixed points in stage space. Forsythe's
deliberate fragmentation of stage space takes Cunningham's idea to a hyperbolic
extreme. It does this by exploiting spatial disjunctions. A sense of frontality
was created when Caspersen or Rizzi performed to the video camera rather
than towards the audience and their image was transmitted to the big video
screens on stage and hanging throughout the auditorium. Because this clashed
with the 'front' of the proscenium, which the audience themselves faced,
one became aware that not only are points not fixed but that they can
be disturbingly multiple, belonging simultaneously to irreconcilable time
spaces.

The relationship
between all these elements, and with less obvious ones like the movement
of flats to create temporary new spaces or to reveal previously hidden
ones, defied rationalisation. It continually evaded any expectations of
conventional closure, despite the personable qualities of the narrators
and the hook of their narratives. The piece montaged together these various
elements and experiences. At their most interesting, these produced startling
and disturbing juxtapositions. But despite this openness, one could not
but marvel at the meticulousness and the hard work with which everything
come together: I might almost say, to fall back on an old cliché, with
Germanic efficiency.

Perhaps this makes “Kammer/Kammer” sound dry and technical, but this was
far from the case. At times the tone was moody and reflective, at other
moments alarmingly histrionic, and this was often produced not only by
the performers' modes of address, but also as a result of the kinds of
spatial experiences created. At one moment Rizzi as the boy could just
be seen from the auditorium sitting alone at a long trestle table right
at the back of the stage reading out a painfully melancholy incident.
In the central episode of the second half, Rizzi as the boy found himself
having to intervene between Caspersen as Deneuve and San Martin as the
object of her obsession as they literally grappled and screaming at one
another, prowling round in a pathological circuit in a claustrophobic
cubicle only visible from the auditorium on video or through a small gap
in a wall of screens. Forsythe and his dancers really know how to pile
chaos over chaos, and how to ratchet up the emotional tension.

”Kammer/Kammer” is not a playful exercise in postmodern irony that subversively
destabilizes meaning in a game of clever citation and simulacra. If anything
it is an attempt to go so far down the deconstructive path that it produces
performative intensities that are as unbearable for today's audiences
as the expressive modern dance of Wigman and Graham was in the first half
of the last century. The critics who knock Forsythe (Rizzi has a cruelly
brilliant dig at Anna Kisselgoff, a prominent American critic who is referred
to as "Anna Kiss-of-death") may want to believe the good old
days are still with us. Those were the days when dancers just danced and
let critics do the philosophising.

One of the things
some critics have attacked are the philosophical quotes Forsythe often
places in his programmes. In most of Europe, philosophy is a central part
of the educational curriculum in a way that is not the case in England
and the United States. The programme for “Kammer/Kammer” comes with two
quotations. The first is from Feuerbach (1804-72), a Hegelian philosopher
of history whose ideas were severely criticised by Karl Marx. The passage
Forsythe has found sounds curiously like Jean Baudrillard, and discusses
the way modern people are only interested in artificial copies of reality
and attribute an almost sacred quality to these. This is clearly connected
with elements like Caspersen's strong resemblance to Deneuve, and the
trompe l'oeil painting on the stage flats.

The other quote comes
from Giles Deleuze (1925-95), and discusses the relationship between seeing
and saying. Running through “Kammer/Kammer” is a split between what the
audience see, and whether we choose to see it directly or on video, and
what we hear: music, sound effects, and, of course, spoken words. (The
person with a megaphone in Forsythe's “Artefact” also talked about this
gap, when he welcomed the audience to 'what you think you see', etc.).
Deleuze suggests that this kind of gap can only be bridged outside these
forms and in another dimension.

Maybe it sounds pretentious
to say that it is towards another dimension that is neither just spoken
nor seen that “Kammer/Kammer” invites audiences to focus their attention.
But the performance is nevertheless an invitation to go beyond the good
old, familiar ways of looking at dance in order to try and find something
else. As I already observed, there is a lot of dancing going on all through
“Kammer/Kammer” that somehow a lot of people seemed not to notice. The
dimensions that Deleuze was referring to, and which clearly interest Forsythe,
are probably always there already, but we just haven't noticed them yet.